BOOK & BLOG

February 4, 2006

Book of the Week: GUN MONKEYS by Victor Gischler

And now for something completely different (to borrow the Monty Python phrase). I’ve been reading Victor Gischler’s GUN MONKEYS, and enjoying it all over again. GUN MONKEYS, as I remembered it, fell heavily into the hard-boiled category. It’s about Charlie Swift, a hired gun for a low-level hood named Stan in central Florida. Stan is on his way out, a thug named Beggar Johnson is on his way in, and the cooked books of Beggar’s organization fall into Charlie’s hands. A fast-paced novel with great dialog and many killings, GUN MONKEYS got all kinds of recognition when it came out. On my second reading, the book wasn’t so hard-boiled underneath, after all. Sure, there are deaths galore -- some careless and brutal, some spectacularly appropriate. But there’s a wistfulness about Charlie, his love for his mother and brother, his attachment to a woman he meets along the way, that soften the effect and give GUN MONKEYS great heart. Charlie is pragmatic and violent, but he’s also loyal. This is one book that deserves all the praise it got when it first came out in 2003.

BLOG

This has been a lost week. Last weekend in New York, I was evidently incubating something awful while I was at the Mystery Writers of America board meeting. I came home not feeling wonderful, and Monday went downhill rapidly. I went to the doctor on Wednesday (stupidly didn’t go on Tuesday) and got an antibiotic. Now the fever’s gone, but I’m just lolling around the house. My husband also came down with it – while he was in Virginia – and came home in much the same shape. We’ve been keeping each other awake, coughing and wheezing.

Maybe that’s why the past week in my daughter’s life has gotten me so unhappy. Usually, I take all the drama that comes with being the mother of a 14-year-old without blinking an eye, but a little over a week ago, she was eating lunch in Taco Bell with some teammates when a woman came to the employee door and tried to shoot her husband. Now, this could have been much worse. She could have fired multiple shots instead of the one, she could have hit other people, and for that matter, she could have hit him. She missed. But when you’re a mom and you hear how frightened your daughter is when she’s been in the same building as a gun held in the hand of someone willing to use it, you don’t think about the good side right away.

You think, “What if the shot had ricocheted?” You think, “What if she had sprayed all the workers and customers with bullets?” You think, “My child could have been killed or injured by someone who doesn’t even know her.”

When this was topped by a large-scale inquiry into drug-selling at the junior high, and an acquaintance who tried to kill herself, it was just an all-time rotten ten days or so.

I think my biggest problem in Junior High was whether any of the boys would ever be taller and bigger than I was. I worried about wearing glasses, and about boys realizing how much smarter I was than most of them. (Yes, seriously.) Granted, I grew up in rural Mississippi, but here in Arkansas we aren’t exactly living in an urban area.

This isn’t anything you haven’t heard before; just not from me, I guess. I’m thinking about this perilous world, and praying for the safety of my children.